On a recent scholarship math post I did some light digging into the number of games and minutes played by each returning player. Turns out Missouri has three players over 2800 minutes played and over 125 games played. Truly a remarkable number, as we’re nearing the end of the COVID bonus era of college basketball.
Looking at Missouri’s experience going into the season inspired me to expand my search a bit. Since the Tigers aren’t the only team leaning into the transfer portal, clearly everyone is doing it.
With the league expanding to 16 teams, there are 15 other teams who are actively using the transfer portal. 15 teams and nearly 200 roster spots. Including Missouri, if you account for 13 scholarships there are 208 spots available on SEC basketball teams. Since I’ve been keeping track of SEC rosters, it was pretty easy to pull up Basketball Reference and find out just how much experience is being imported into SEC rosters this year in comparison to a previous year. Something from the past. Let’s say… 2019.
Ah, 2019. Going into the season it was just like every other year from the beginning of time. Transfers had ticked up but were far from the norm. The transfer portal was launched in October of 2018, so it had only been open for a year. And if you transferred, players were still subject to the rule of having to sit out a season. The so-called residency rule… that was just six years ago and yet it feels like three decades.
Going into the 2019 season, there were just 13 players in all of the SEC who played division one minutes prior to that season, but not at the school they were playing for heading into the 2019-20 season. The caveat there is the player had to play those minutes in their last eligible season. Did that make sense?
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Here’s a Mizzou example: The 2019-2020 season included both Mark Smith and Dru Smith. Both were transfers. Mark was eligible to play right away during the 2018-2019 season. Dru was not eligible to play right away and played his first game for Mizzou in the 19-20 season. So Dru counts in this exercise as a ‘Newcomer’ transfer, but Mark counts as a ‘Returner’. Make sense?
Everything here includes Texas and Oklahoma. And here’s what we know:
In 2019 there were 101 players who played division one minutes prior to that season. With 13 having played somewhere else, that means 88 played the season before for the same team in the SEC.
What does that number look like now? There are 145 players who played D1 minutes prior to the season who are on SEC rosters right now. There are also 20 open spots still available to fill, out of 208-ish spots (granted with NIL there is some over signing going on, but roughly 208 spots).
That’s still over 3⁄4 of the committed players having experience when there were just under 50% just a few years ago. But more than just experience, it’s imported experience.
With eligibility tossed out the window, increasing NIL budgets, and boosters and coaches doing whatever they can to make the NCAA tournament, we’ve seen much of College Basketball turned on it’s head the last few years. We can really get a very clear picture of the College Basketball landscape both pre and post-COVID. The infectious disease which shut down the world had its own impact. Increasing experience across the board. The 2019-20 season counted but was shut down with no NCAA Tournament. The 2020-21 season didn’t count, and with that we headed into unprecedented territory.
Going into the 19-20 season just three players saw minutes in over 100 games. This year that count is 40. From 0.1875 players per team to two and a half. Coaches have invested heavily into bringing in experience, but to just what kind of degree?
We’ll talk about that tomorrow.